WordPress Backup Plugins — Making the Best Choice

Backups are an important part of any data storage, including websites. Thankfully, for WordPress users, the options are plenty when it comes to WordPress backup plugins.

At VeeroTech, we provide daily backups for all hosting accounts. That said, it is always a smart strategy to keep your own backups — preferably on an offsite storage. With the help of WordPress backup plugins, you can easily backup your website. Of course, we hope you never have to restore a backup, but it is always better to have a backup and not need it than to need a backup and not have one handy. 

WordPress Backup Plugins — Making the Best Choice

In this article, we will be taking a look at some of the best WordPress backup plugins for you to choose from.

UpdraftPlus

With over 3 million downloads, UpdraftPlus is the de facto leader when it comes to WordPress backup plugins. It lets you backup your WP site into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email.

With the paid version, you can also backup to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.

The biggest reason behind the popularity of UpdraftPlus is that it lets you restore your backups with one click — a feature that many WordPress backup plugins tend to lack. The free version works perfectly fine for most users — however, certain features are available only on the premium version, such as incremental backups, support for WordPress multisite, encryption of your backed up data, etc.

• Plugin Homepage | WP.org Page
• Premium Version – Plans starting from $42 per year

BackWPup

BackWPup is another feature-rich name in the world of WordPress backup plugins. It boasts of a heavy range of features, including the ability to check, repair, and optimize the WordPress database prior to backing it up.

The free version of BackWPup lets you backup your site to local storage (that can then be manually downloaded), FTP, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and a few others. The premium version comes with integration for Google Drive, OneDrive, and Amazon Glacier.

• Plugin Homepage | WP.org Page 
• Premium Version – Plans starting from $69 per year

Backup Guard

Backup Guard, in the free tier, lets you pick from three options — download backups to your local storage, upload via FTP, or upload to Dropbox.

This is, obviously, not as feature-rich as many other WordPress backup plugins out there. However, you can also schedule automated backups to happen at specific times with Backup Guard. Another plus point of this particular plugin is that it supports WordPress Multisite even on its free plan.

The pro version comes with integration support for Amazon S3, Google Drive, OneDrive, and other cloud storage providers. The best part? Backup Guard Pro is a highly economical option, especially if you are running just one or two WP sites.

• Plugin Homepage | WP.org Page
• Premium Version – Plans starting from $25 for two sites (lifetime)

WPvivid

With nearly 80,000+ users, WPvivid has built a fairly loyal community. When it comes to WordPress backup plugins, WPvivid is pretty much a Swiss army knife — it lets you backup your site, optimizes and eliminate unused images, optimize and clean database fragments, and so on.

The free version of WPvivid supports Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, SFTP, and FTP. The premium version adds a few additional cloud storage providers, such as Wasabi and pCloud.

WPvivid is also, quite possibly, the only backup plugin that offers email support even for free users.

• Plugin Homepage | WP.org Page
• Premium Version – Plans starting from $99 for 3 websites (lifetime usage)

Total Upkeep

Total Upkeep is another popular name in the world of WordPress backup plugins. That said, it does not have anything unique in particular to boast of. You can generate your own backups and download them for safekeeping, or you can upgrade to the premium version and get remote cloud uploads to Google Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon S3.

If you are looking for a WP backup plugin, Total Upkeep might not be the first pick owing to its lack of features on the free variant.

• WP.org Page | Plugin Homepage
• Premium Version – Plans starting from $30 per year

Jetpack Backups

Jetpack by WP.com is a popular and feature-rich plugin that brings a plethora of features to the table. You get website statistics, brute force protection, anti-spam features, and a lot more on the Jetpack free plan.

You can upgrade to a paid plan to get backups as part of Jetpack. If you are using Jetpack already, upgrading to a paid plan makes sense as its backup offerings are fairly decent. Beyond that, you are also entitled to support straight from the Automattic team, the folks behind WordPress. This means for a small fee, you get access to several features, such as advanced WP security, backups (daily), and additional features from Jetpack.

There is no direct integration with remote cloud providers, albeit Jetpack offers its own cloud storage for your backups (with 30-day retention), as well as a free CDN for images.

• Plugin Homepage | WP.org Page
• Premium Version – Plans starting from approx $60 per year (pricing may vary depending on your location)

Conclusion

That brings us to the end of this roundup about WordPress backup plugins. Now, the big question — which plugin should you opt for?

Here is a summary of the comparison:

As you can see, there is no easy winner when it comes to WordPress backup plugins. With that said, we believe UpdraftPlus is a worthy pick, primarily because it offers one-click restores and integrates tightly with various remote storage providers. In addition to that, the fact that it has over 3 million downloads on WP.org speaks volumes in its favor.

However, if you are a Jetpack user, you should strongly consider opting for the paid plans and getting access to detailed backup and security features. Jetpack is backed by the parent company behind WordPress itself, and it offers tight integration with WP. It does come with a downside though — WP sites running Jetpack tend to be bulkier in terms of CPU resource usage. However, this can be offset by the fact that you get access to a CDN, a backup service, and stellar video storage features (among other things) with Jetpack.

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